Mississippi John Hurt
Vanguard Visionaries

If this review were to focus solely upon the quality of the music contained
on the installment of Vanguard Visionaries that is devoted to Mississippi
John Hurt’s career, it would be unthinkable to give it anything less than five
stars. Hurt’s music is blues in its purest and sweetest form. The tracks
contained on the effort are transcendent and lovely; they also are powerful and
purifying. Although it is both simple and technically unpolished by today’s
standards, Hurt’s guitar style epitomizes everything that is appealing about the
country-blues sub-genre.

Born in Avalon, Mississippi in 1892, Hurt began playing the guitar as a
child, and he performed professionally from a very young age. He recorded two
brilliant albums in 1928 for the seminal Okeh label, but the coming depression
forced Hurt to retire from the music business in order to seek work as a
sharecropper. He remained a farm worker, occasionally playing and singing at
local dances, until he was located in 1963 by musicologist Tom Hoskins. Hoskins
convinced Hurt to move to Washington, D.C. and revive his career as a singer and
musician. Hurt became a regular at folk clubs and colleges throughout the U.S.,
and he recorded three studio albums (Today!, The Immortal Mississippi
John Hurt, and Last Sessions) as well as several concert sets for the
Vanguard label before his death in 1966. The music on Vanguard Visionaries
is culled entirely from these endeavors. Beautiful versions of some of his
best-known songs — such as Stagolee, When I Lay My Burden Down,
and Farther Along — are featured.

The problem with Vanguard Visionaries does not reside with the music.
Hurt’s performance is stellar, and it should be heard. Every serious music fan
should have at least one of his albums, but it shouldn’t necessarily be this
one. Vanguard obviously produced the entire Vanguard Visionaries series
on the cheap. For starters, there are only 10 songs in the collection. There is
room for at least twice that. Reissues are not expensive for a label to produce,
and many companies — such as the jazz-oriented Verve — are releasing
budget-priced CDs with more than 80 minutes of music on them.

To make matters worse — Vanguard Visionaries contains no liner notes!
Other than printing Mississippi John Hurt’s name on the cover of the album there
is no other information about him in the packaging. How much would it have cost
to have a 100- or 200-word blurb printed on the back cover or inside the sleeve
of the disc? As it is, these lovely tracks — like the Dead Sea Scrolls before
they were translated — exist in a vacuum.

Mississippi John Hurt is an important artist because his work, as simple and
understated as it may be, has had a tremendous influence upon popular music over
the past half-century. It needs to be understood and appreciated in context. He
deserves a better legacy than Vanguard Visionaries offers. Any of his
other efforts for Vanguard — such as the stellar upgrade of The Best of
Mississippi John Hurt, which was re-titled Live in 2002 — are far
better places to start exploring his work.